TVs of the future are about to get a whole lot brighter

The flat screen TV at right is equipped with the new 3Mquantum dot enhancement film, the set on the left is not so equipped. 3M gave a demonstration of their new technology to make flat screen TVs more vibrant on their campus in Maplewood, Tuesday morning Ovtober 22, 2013.

A decade after helping make flat-screen TVs the norm in living rooms, 3M Co. plans to add some color.

It’s more than just a dash of brightness. 3M’s new quantum dot enhancement film — or QDEF — is engineered to make the reds, greens and blues on any flat screen deeper and richer.

It also is designed to make money again for 3M. Optical film sales to electronics manufacturers once generated 3M’s highest profit margins.

But in recent years, 3M has seen industrial sales of its optical film products top out, as the recession hit and fewer people were buying new screens for their homes.

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When 3M CEO Inge Thulin highlighted some of the company’s new “disruptive technologies” in a conference call last week, he noted that the quantum dot film is nearing its commercial rollout.

The quantum dot film is in the screen of the latest model of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, and 3M is hoping to have it in a wider range of consumer electronics by the 2014 holiday season.

“We’re working the supply chain now,” said Dave Lamb, an advanced physics research specialist at 3M, who worked on the technology. “I think the industry is excited about it.”

The paper-thin quantum dot film is 3M’s latest innovation in the world of optical film, ubiquitous in flat-screen products such as TVs, cell phones and computer monitors. 3M’s various models of optical film make images on flat screens brighter, allowing the devices to project a higher-quality picture without using additional electricity, extending battery life.

The quantum dots that are key to the new technology are tiny crystal particles, about 10,000 times narrower than a human hair. The quantum dots, made by 3M’s partner, Nanosys Inc., based in California, are embedded in a layer of 3M optical film.

Instead of using white light-emitting diodes, blue light is used and filtered through the layer of quantum dot enhancement film. Nanosys’ dots are engineered to emit light at precise wavelengths, allowing flat-screen manufacturers to produce more saturated reds, greens and blues.

During a recent demonstration at 3M’s headquarters in Maplewood, the reds on a traditional flat-panel TV screen looked distinctly orange compared with the reds filtered through the new film.

Beyond enhancing the colors in your favorite show or website, 3M said the quantum dots also provide a benefit to online shoppers: The on-screen color of the clothes will appear closer to the product that shows up at your door.

The QDEF technology was on display at the CE Week consumer electronics show in New York in July, where two flat screens displayed the old and the new.

When the show wrapped up, the security guards who were across from the 3M display came over and asked where they could buy it, said John Van Derlofske, a senior research specialist who worked on the technology’s application to flat screens.

“It’s good stuff,” said Steve Atwood, an expert in display technology and the director of product development for a display terminal company.

He’s seen the quantum-dot technology in several demonstrations and said the difference in color saturation is stark.

For the look projected by quantum dot film as a whole, the question is whether consumers “really know what they’re getting” when they look at the deep colors, he said. Some of the colors may be richer than they are in real life, but “consumers might jump on that in certain ways,” he said.

As 3M prepares for a broader QDEF push into consumer electronics, it’s counting on its latest innovation to open up a new section of the optical film market, which it used to dominate.

Flat-panel devices such as big-screen TVs grew in popularity in the past decade, and 3M’s ability to manufacture the high-tech optical film that enhanced the picture made it a market leader. At one point, optical film helped make 3M’s display and graphics division the most profitable part of the diversified company.

But by the time the recession hit in late 2007, 3M was running into low-cost competitors producing less expensive optical film. Consumers embraced the lower price and 3M’s high-quality, high-profit-margin film lost some ground.

There’s competition for the quantum-dot technology, too. A company called QDVision, based in Massachusetts, also uses quantum dots to pull out richer colors in flat screens. But instead of using optical film, QDVision runs a thin glass tube containing quantum dots along the edges of the screen. Blue-light emitting diodes pass through the tubes to produce the rich color on the screen.

The QDVision technology is now available in some Sony TVs, and early sales reportedly have been strong.

3M believes it has an advantage over the tube technology because of the manufacturing process. 3M’s quantum dots are contained in a single layer of razor-thin film, which can be placed in between other layers already present in flat screen products.

Then, once the white light-emitting diodes are swapped out for blue ones, “it’s a fairly drop-in solution” for TV and computer manufacturers, Lamb said.

Whatever the competition, 3M said it’s well-prepared to brighten up the market for flat-screen technology. Its quantum dot enhancement film will be on display at the giant annual consumer electronics trade show, set for January in Las Vegas.